The A arte Invernizzi gallery will open on Thursday 21 September 2017 at 6.30 p.m. a solo exhibition of works by Lesley Foxcroft, with some pieces specially made for the gallery’s spaces.

In the first room upstairs there are works, such as “Folds” and “Knotted”, in industrial rubber, a relatively new material for the English artist, who has always worked with simple, basic raw materials of fundamental everyday use, such as paper, cardboard and medium-density fibre board (MDF). In these works, as well as in the “Eye Level” installation in the second room on the upper floor, Foxcroft adopts a strict, austere visual language to manipulate the material and create forms not normally associated with it.
The ability to bring out aspects of the material that are usually not found in its everyday use is clear to see also in “Stacked” and “Milan Corner”, as well as in the other works in MDF that are on show on the lower floor of the gallery. Foxcroft manages to combine the flexibility of the raw material in a perfect balance with the simplicity of functional elements - such as hooks, eyelets, clamps and screws - in such a way as to create a new entity, a new ensemble, that guides our perception in a clear new manner that is both logical and rational.

On the occasion of the exhibition a catalogue will be published with illustrations of the works on display, a poem by Carlo Invernizzi and updated bio-bibliographical notes.

Brand New Gallery is pleased to present “Casitas”, the first solo gallery exhibition by Enoc Perez in Italy.
On view a selection of paintings from Enoc Perez’ Casitas series. These small and intimate oil paintings portray Enoc’s own humble beginnings in Puerto Rico through the depiction of the island’s own vernacular architecture.
He focalizes his attention on his native land with semi-abstract but emotionally evocative Puerto Rican architectures, homelands which immigrants have left behind in order to pursue better lives in the US.
The works conjure emotionally-charged memories that Latino immigrants carry with them as they pursue the American dream.
Named after places in Puerto Rico, these unpretentious paintings combine abstract elements with representation to capture a haunting feeling of Puerto Rico’s distant past and contemporary present. Splattered fields of thick paint and vivid color are combined to create emotionally charged paintings that conjure up the island’s diverse cultural instant.
Born in San Juan in 1967, Enoc Perez first took painting lessons at the age of eight. Son of an art critic, he spent family vacations traveling to museums in different countries and learning about art history. In 1986, Perez moved to New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute before earning his master’s degree at Hunter College. Finding himself at odds with the program at Hunter, where students and faculty criticized his paintings as overly seductive and decorative, Perez maintained his belief in the importance of the aesthetics in art. Embracing art’s potential for pleasure and beauty, Perez paints sensuous nudes, still lifes, tropical resorts, and modern architectural icons in a sleek aesthetic with dazzling, vibrant colors.

“I am interested in discovering and assimilating the overlooked deteriorated layers of advertising on walls fading and withering in the sun. I see the writing on the wall and the storied layers of paint as the psychology of society”.
José Parlá - Brooklyn, NY

Brand New Gallery is pleased and thrilled to present “Mirrors” the first solo exhibition by José Parlá at the gallery.
In Mirrors, Parlá creates a new series of paintings that reinvent the cityscape by exporting parts of walls he found in Italy to his Brooklyn studio in order to create work that interplays and re-contextualizes detritus appropriated and presented as objet trouvé in both abstract paintings and poetic interpretations of places seen by the artist’s eye.
Parlá collected ripped posters he has applied to his work as collage that will be returned to their country of origin using his paintings as the vessels translating his journey from Milan to Rome, Napoli, Matera, Bari, Lecce and Bologna. In these works, Parlá reflects on memories from his travels and imports them back to Italy as carriers of new meaning.
In this exhibition José Parlá pays homage to several artists such as Mimmo Rotella, Isidore Isou, Tristan Tzara, and Burhan Dogançay, and art movements that are close in relation to his practice: New Realism and Lettrism. With these new works Parlá continues to examine ways of how his own art making process over the years has incorporated; writing, texture, collage and Metagraphics with what the Romanian artist and founder of the Lettrist movement Isidore Isou defined as: “[...] encompassing all the means of ideographic, lexical and phonetic notation, supplements the means of expression based on sound by adding a specifically plastic dimension, a visual facet which is irreducible and escapes oral labelling.”
By working in this tradition Parlá captures a ‘visual phonetic poetry’ throughout his art. Isou’s right hand man, Maurice Lemaître, a Lettrist theorist, added that Hypergraphics is an “ensemble of signs capable of transmitting the reality served by the consciousness more exactly than all the former fragmentary and partial practices.”

The Fondazione Sozzani, presents “SHE” a selection of photographs by Viviane Sassen. Born in Amsterdam in 1972, for more than twenty years Sassen has been devising her personal visual codes in fashion, portraiture, and visual arts.

Imbued with rarefied atmospheres, Viviane Sassen's photographs are often marked by long shadows, silhouettes and high contrasts. Suspended between reality and fiction, her images suggest unusual, almost impenetrable dimensions that rise from everyday life.

Some works reveal a call to the unconscious or subtle reminders of surrealism, with references to disorder and disorientation seen in the unusual positions of models in dance or performance postures.

Viviane Sassen studied fashion design in Utrecht (at HKU) and photography at the Dutch Art Institute of Atelier Arnhem, but many of her surreal colors come from Africa, where she lived for three years as a child, following her physician father.

Viviane says: “My memories from Kenya are very visual, I was a sensitive child with a keen fantasy life and I picked up on everything that was happening around me.”
Over the years, her more enigmatic pictures have moved away from the physical site
where they have been realized to inhabit a space on the border between waking and dreams.

Included in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Viviane Sassen received multiple honors, such as the Infinity Award of NYC in New York in 2011 and the Dutch Prix de Rome Prize in 2007. She was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her exhibition Umbra in 2015.

Sassen embarked on an international career in fashion photography, but she belongs to a generation of photo-artists who do not make a clear distinction between personal research and their commercial and editorial work. For her the photograph is almost always a personal view.

Her images are seen in magazines such as Purple, i-D, Dazed and Confused, Vogue and
The New York Times Magazine, and in many ad campaigns including Adidas, Stella McCartney,
Miu Miu, Missoni, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton. In 2009 Vivian Sassen exhibited at the Spazio Forma in Milan and in 2008 at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam. In 2012 a traveling retrospective of her work took place at the Hus Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, touring in many venues like the Rencontres d' Arles Festival, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia, USA, the Frankfurt Forum Photography and the Winterthur Photo Museum, Switzerland.
With her latest work, “Umbra” this year she is exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

Notable group shows in 2011 included “New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; “No Fashion, Please!” at the Vienna Kunsthalle; and “Figure and Ground” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto as part of the Contact Photography Festival.
Fondazione Sozzani
The Sozzani Foundation was established in 2016 by Carla Sozzani and is dedicated to the promotion of culture through photography, fashion, the fine arts, and applied arts. The Foundation will assume the patronage of Galleria Carla Sozzani and will continue all relevant public functions that the Galleria has supported for the past 27 years.

Galleria Christian Stein is presenting a show of the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, held simultaneously in both its exhibition locations. The exhibition includes a group of new pieces and a selection of works that retrace some fundamental stages of the career of one of the most important Italian artists working today. Over the years Pistoletto has received great international acclaim. He received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, honorary degrees from the University of Turin (in Political Science) and the Universidad de las Artes in Havana and the Accademia di Brera (both in Art), and large-scale retrospectives at both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Louvre.

An initial group of works exhibited in Pero consists of some of the artist’s Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), which brought him international renown in the early 1960s and became the basis for his subsequent artistic research and parallel theoretical reflections. These include important Mirror Paintings that employ the technique of painted tissue paper applied to sheets of stainless steel polished to a mirror surface, for example Persona di schiena (Person Seen from the Back, 1962), Autoritratto con pianta (Self-portrait with Plant, 1965) and Gilardi che trasporta un cubo (Gilardi Carrying a Cube, 1966). The latter work was created for the historic exhibition/action La fine di Pistoletto (The End of Pistoletto) at the Piper discotheque in Turin, in March 1967, where Pistoletto began his practice of going outside traditional exhibition spaces to embark on “creative collaboration,” which would become a hallmark element of much of his work. Significant Mirror Paintings that he subsequently created using silkscreen, beginning in 1973, include Sacra conversazione. Anselmo, Zorio e Penone (1974), Deposizione (Deposition, 1974), and one rarely seen work, Il Collezionista (The Collector, 1977), a portrait that also contains a work by Kounellis.
The show also includes a new series of mirror paintings entitled Scaffali (Shelves), exhibited for the first time at this location, in the gallery’s historic venue on Corso Monforte.

A second group of famous works, on display at the Pero location, consists of several Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), which Pistoletto created and exhibited in his studio in 1965-66. Based on the contingent dimension of time that shattered the dogma of the uniformity of individual artistic style, these works are recognized as precursors to Arte Povera, the art movement identified and named by Germano Celant in 1967 — a movement for which Pistoletto was a guiding light and leading figure. Alongside the Oggetti in meno, some Quadri specchianti from 2009, which depict the former works in the form of an image applied to a mirror surface, further multiplying reflections and references amidst the real space, the virtual space and viewers.
A third group of works includes some of the most significant examples of Arte Povera, such as the celebrated Venere degli stracci (Venus of the Rags, 1967) and Orchestra di stracci (Orchestra of Rags, 1968). Also on display are Pietra miliare (Milestone, 1967), first exhibited in a historic Pistoletto show in 1967 at Galleria Sperone in Turin, as well as other works created on that occasion, made from ephemeral materials such as light and its reflections, newly installed here: Candele (Candles, 1967), Riflessi (Reflections, 1967) and Tenda di fili elettrica (Curtain of Electric Wires, 1967).

An entire space in the exhibition is dedicated to Labirinto (Labyrinth), an installation that emotionally involves the viewer and which was first created at the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam in 1969.

Le stanze (The Rooms, 1975-76) has a strong connection to the collaboration between Pistoletto and the Galleria Christian Stein. This is a reinstallation of a complex work that Pistoletto created between October 1975 and September 1976, at the gallery’s location in Piazza San Carlo in Turin. Within these spaces — three rooms connected by three doors aligned on the same axis and similar in size to the mirror paintings — Pistoletto created twelve consecutive shows, one per month, each preceded by a text by the artist. Overall, it highlights the strong significance of the temporal dimension in Pistoletto’s creative process and work. The twelve rooms, which provided consecutive viewings in the gallery’s Turin space, originally looking out on the “salotto di Torino” piazza, are reproposed simultaneously, inside the former industrial spaces that now constitute the gallery in Pero.

Mobili capovolti (Overturned Furniture, 1976), instead, is one of Cento mostre nel mese di ottobre (One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October), a small book Pistoletto created in 1976, immediately after Le Stanze. With his expansion of the exhibition event of Le Stanze, Pistoletto progressed to a point of extreme concentration with this book, which contains one hundred ideas for an equal number of shows, a sort of recipe book for exhibitions and works, many of which would be realized over subsequent years, such as, precisely, Mobili capovolti, seen here.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began exhibiting in 1955 and in 1960 had his first solo show at the Galleria Galatea in Turin. His early pictorial work is characterized by an investigation of the self-portrait. During the two-year period 1961-62 he created his Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), where the work directly includes the presence of the viewer, re-opening the point of view and reversing Renaissance perspective, moving in a direction that had been closed off by twentieth-century avant-garde movements. With these works Pistoletto soon received international recognition and success, leading, as early as the ‘Sixties, to solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings became the basis for his subsequent artistic production and theoretical ideas. Between 1965 and 1966 he produced a group of works entitled Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement in which Pistoletto was a guiding light and leading figure. Beginning in 1967, working outside traditional exhibition spaces, he created actions that represent the first manifestations of a “creative collaboration” that he would develop over subsequent decades, in an interaction with artists coming from various disciplines and increasingly wide-ranging sectors of society. Between 1975 and 1976 he created Le Stanze (The Rooms), a series of twelve consecutive shows at the Galleria Stein in Turin, the first in a series of complex works articulated over the span of one year. Entitled “continents of time,” these include Anno Bianco (White Year, 1989) and Tartaruga Felice (Happy Tortoise, 1992). In 1978 he held an exhibition where he presented two fundamental directions of his future research and artistic production: Divisione e moltiplicazione dello speccio (Division and Multiplication of the Mirror) and L’arte assume la religion (Art Takes on Religion). In the early ‘Eighties he created a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for a 1984 solo show at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created a series of “dark” volumes called Arte dello squallore (Art of Squalor). During the ‘Nineties, with the journal Progetto Arte and the creation, in Biella, of Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and the Università delle Idee, he established an active relationship between art and various social realms, in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 the University of Turin granted him an honorary degree in Political Science. On this occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, known as Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise). In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, “for his constantly creative career as an artist, educator and activist, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to prophetic forms of art that contribute to a new comprehension of the world.” In 2010 he wrote the essay Il Terzo Paradiso, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2011 he was the Artistic Director of Evento 2011 — L’art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux. In 2012 he became the promoter of Rebirth-day, the first universal day of rebirth celebrated every year on December 21st, with events held throughout the world. In 2013 a solo show of his work, entitled année un — le paradis sur terre, opened at the Louvre Museum in Paris. That same year, in Tokyo, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting. In 2014 the symbol of Terzo Paradiso was installed in the atrium of the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Brussels, during the period when an Italian held the Presidency. In May 2015 the Universidad de las Artes in Havana awarded Pistoletto an honorary degree. Also in 2015, he created a large-scale work entitled Rebirth, located in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the United Nations.
www.pistoletto.it
www.cittadellarte.com

Galleria Christian Stein is presenting a show of the work of Michelangelo Pistoletto, held simultaneously in both its exhibition locations. The exhibition includes a group of new pieces and a selection of works that retrace some fundamental stages of the career of one of the most important Italian artists working today. Over the years Pistoletto has received great international acclaim. He received the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, honorary degrees from the University of Turin (in Political Science) and the Universidad de las Artes in Havana and the Accademia di Brera (both in Art), and large-scale retrospectives at both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Louvre.

An initial group of works exhibited in Pero consists of some of the artist’s Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), which brought him international renown in the early 1960s and became the basis for his subsequent artistic research and parallel theoretical reflections. These include important Mirror Paintings that employ the technique of painted tissue paper applied to sheets of stainless steel polished to a mirror surface, for example Persona di schiena (Person Seen from the Back, 1962), Autoritratto con pianta (Self-portrait with Plant, 1965) and Gilardi che trasporta un cubo (Gilardi Carrying a Cube, 1966). The latter work was created for the historic exhibition/action La fine di Pistoletto (The End of Pistoletto) at the Piper discotheque in Turin, in March 1967, where Pistoletto began his practice of going outside traditional exhibition spaces to embark on “creative collaboration,” which would become a hallmark element of much of his work. Significant Mirror Paintings that he subsequently created using silkscreen, beginning in 1973, include Sacra conversazione. Anselmo, Zorio e Penone (1974), Deposizione (Deposition, 1974), and one rarely seen work, Il Collezionista (The Collector, 1977), a portrait that also contains a work by Kounellis.
The show also includes a new series of mirror paintings entitled Scaffali (Shelves), exhibited for the first time at this location, in the gallery’s historic venue on Corso Monforte.

A second group of famous works, on display at the Pero location, consists of several Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), which Pistoletto created and exhibited in his studio in 1965-66. Based on the contingent dimension of time that shattered the dogma of the uniformity of individual artistic style, these works are recognized as precursors to Arte Povera, the art movement identified and named by Germano Celant in 1967 — a movement for which Pistoletto was a guiding light and leading figure. Alongside the Oggetti in meno, some Quadri specchianti from 2009, which depict the former works in the form of an image applied to a mirror surface, further multiplying reflections and references amidst the real space, the virtual space and viewers.
A third group of works includes some of the most significant examples of Arte Povera, such as the celebrated Venere degli stracci (Venus of the Rags, 1967) and Orchestra di stracci (Orchestra of Rags, 1968). Also on display are Pietra miliare (Milestone, 1967), first exhibited in a historic Pistoletto show in 1967 at Galleria Sperone in Turin, as well as other works created on that occasion, made from ephemeral materials such as light and its reflections, newly installed here: Candele (Candles, 1967), Riflessi (Reflections, 1967) and Tenda di fili elettrica (Curtain of Electric Wires, 1967).

An entire space in the exhibition is dedicated to Labirinto (Labyrinth), an installation that emotionally involves the viewer and which was first created at the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam in 1969.

Le stanze (The Rooms, 1975-76) has a strong connection to the collaboration between Pistoletto and the Galleria Christian Stein. This is a reinstallation of a complex work that Pistoletto created between October 1975 and September 1976, at the gallery’s location in Piazza San Carlo in Turin. Within these spaces — three rooms connected by three doors aligned on the same axis and similar in size to the mirror paintings — Pistoletto created twelve consecutive shows, one per month, each preceded by a text by the artist. Overall, it highlights the strong significance of the temporal dimension in Pistoletto’s creative process and work. The twelve rooms, which provided consecutive viewings in the gallery’s Turin space, originally looking out on the “salotto di Torino” piazza, are reproposed simultaneously, inside the former industrial spaces that now constitute the gallery in Pero.

Mobili capovolti (Overturned Furniture, 1976), instead, is one of Cento mostre nel mese di ottobre (One Hundred Exhibitions in the Month of October), a small book Pistoletto created in 1976, immediately after Le Stanze. With his expansion of the exhibition event of Le Stanze, Pistoletto progressed to a point of extreme concentration with this book, which contains one hundred ideas for an equal number of shows, a sort of recipe book for exhibitions and works, many of which would be realized over subsequent years, such as, precisely, Mobili capovolti, seen here.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began exhibiting in 1955 and in 1960 had his first solo show at the Galleria Galatea in Turin. His early pictorial work is characterized by an investigation of the self-portrait. During the two-year period 1961-62 he created his Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), where the work directly includes the presence of the viewer, re-opening the point of view and reversing Renaissance perspective, moving in a direction that had been closed off by twentieth-century avant-garde movements. With these works Pistoletto soon received international recognition and success, leading, as early as the ‘Sixties, to solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings became the basis for his subsequent artistic production and theoretical ideas. Between 1965 and 1966 he produced a group of works entitled Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement in which Pistoletto was a guiding light and leading figure. Beginning in 1967, working outside traditional exhibition spaces, he created actions that represent the first manifestations of a “creative collaboration” that he would develop over subsequent decades, in an interaction with artists coming from various disciplines and increasingly wide-ranging sectors of society. Between 1975 and 1976 he created Le Stanze (The Rooms), a series of twelve consecutive shows at the Galleria Stein in Turin, the first in a series of complex works articulated over the span of one year. Entitled “continents of time,” these include Anno Bianco (White Year, 1989) and Tartaruga Felice (Happy Tortoise, 1992). In 1978 he held an exhibition where he presented two fundamental directions of his future research and artistic production: Divisione e moltiplicazione dello speccio (Division and Multiplication of the Mirror) and L’arte assume la religion (Art Takes on Religion). In the early ‘Eighties he created a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for a 1984 solo show at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created a series of “dark” volumes called Arte dello squallore (Art of Squalor). During the ‘Nineties, with the journal Progetto Arte and the creation, in Biella, of Cittadellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto and the Università delle Idee, he established an active relationship between art and various social realms, in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 the University of Turin granted him an honorary degree in Political Science. On this occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, known as Terzo Paradiso (Third Paradise). In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem, “for his constantly creative career as an artist, educator and activist, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to prophetic forms of art that contribute to a new comprehension of the world.” In 2010 he wrote the essay Il Terzo Paradiso, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2011 he was the Artistic Director of Evento 2011 — L’art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux. In 2012 he became the promoter of Rebirth-day, the first universal day of rebirth celebrated every year on December 21st, with events held throughout the world. In 2013 a solo show of his work, entitled année un — le paradis sur terre, opened at the Louvre Museum in Paris. That same year, in Tokyo, he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting. In 2014 the symbol of Terzo Paradiso was installed in the atrium of the headquarters of the Council of the European Union in Brussels, during the period when an Italian held the Presidency. In May 2015 the Universidad de las Artes in Havana awarded Pistoletto an honorary degree. Also in 2015, he created a large-scale work entitled Rebirth, located in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the United Nations.
www.pistoletto.it
www.cittadellarte.com

Federica Schiavo Gallery is pleased to present Extractions, the second solo show by Ishmael Randall Weeks at the gallery.
The show takes an interest in a continued dialogue within geographic, architectural, and cultural space that has a particular reference to time as a marker for the confluence of past, present and future. Within the research aspects of Randall Weeks’ work is an acute interest in the specificity of source material as a valuable tool to weave meaning into transformative states with a particular focus on archeology and museology.
The works in the show present Metalized Memory, a four parts installation with specific crafted wood display cases containing copper-plated contemporary objects sourced from pre-Colombian archaeological sites that elicit a museological gaze disrupting the distinction between debris, artifact and art object; a wall and floor mounted brass structural work titled Wind Variations Construct holds fragile naturally eroded 1960’s bricks from the abandoned utopian construction sites in the desert. Alongside these works are photo-transfer images that brought together pay tribute to constructivist form and commercial consumerism.
Two wall mounted works from the series Excavation Annotations are compositions based on textile works from the Nazca culture, but where those textiles are digitally altered and colored and then transferred onto acrylic gel whose material consistency feels much like papyrus or hide. These works hang delicately on steel bars and sit alongside copper and silver plates, minerals and other objects that take into account different monumental time frames.
Within these sculptures and materials is a closely allied theme of economic scarcity that concerns itself with memory, identity and ways of living within the landscape rooted in a push and pull of fragility over security.
Ishmael Randall Weeks will be featured in this year’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at cultural institutions across Southern California. The artist simultaneously presents Annotations, Striations and Souvenirs at Van Doren Waxter Gallery in NYC.

Galleria Fumagalli presents DYSTOPIA, the first solo show by French artists Anne and Patrick Poirier, in its exhibition space at Via Bonaventura Cavalieri 6 in Milan. The exhibition will be accompanied by a monograph that documents the fifty years of artistic practice of the couple, published by Éditions Flammarion with the support of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Galerie Mitterand and Galleria Fumagalli.

Since 1967, Anne and Patrick Poirier have been working together as travellers, surveyors of sites and discoverers of ancient civilizations, religions and cultures. Embracing the human sciences with an artistic approach and in the wake of Claude Lévi-Strauss's teachings, during their explorations they gather archive material useful for the understanding of the organization and the disappearance of ancient societies. For the exhibition DYSTOPIA Anne and Patrick Poirier worked on the production of new works, in continuity with the research done in recent years on the sites of ancient Mesopotamia (today Iraq and Syria) and as a sum of a shared and always moving work methodology. The title of the exhibition refers explicitly to the term dystopia, coined at the end of the eighteenth century as negative antithetical of utopia: an artificial society in which some social, political and technological trends experienced in the present are brought to the extreme by highlighting their negative and distorting aspects. Similarly, using the past and the present as subjects matter for the creation of an aesthetic representation of future suggestions, the work of the Poirier creates invented models, incarnations of imaginable but artificial forms of civilization. Every form, every fraction, every architectural or visual fragment, is linked to historical events and imaginary notions, inviting the observer to no longer perceive History as an entity separate from existence but to live and interiorize the present in a wider historical environment.

Anne and Patrick Poirier studied at the École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and participated in the residence of Villa Medici in Rome from 1969 to 1971. Numerous the international exhibitions in which they took part: the Venice Biennale (1976, 1980 and 1984) documenta VI in Kassel (1977) and the Biennale de Lyon (2000). Their work has been exposed in some of the most prestigious institutions such as the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin (1977), the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1978), the MoMA in New York (1979) and The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2001). More recently, their work was exhibited at the Couvent de la Tourette (2013), at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes (2014), at the Musée d'Art Moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne (2016) and at the Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden (Tony Cragg Foundation) (2016). In September 2017, in addition to the exhibition DYSTOPIA at Galleria Fumagalli in Milan, they inaugurate their personal shows at Galerie Mitterand in Paris (September 8 - October 31, 2017) and at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris (6 September - 29 October, 2017).

Giovanni Bonelli Gallery is pleased to present Chasing Lights, the second solo show by berlin-based Italian artist Giuseppe Gonella.
The exhibition will include fifteen works permeated with a suspended atmosphere, typical of Gonella’s production. “I am interested in the moment, where everything is still possible. - the artist said- Where even the smallest space can become fertile ground at the epiphany of an event or state of suffering, or literally before destruction.”
The works especially prepared for this show are “unresolved allegories in motion”. They are like explorations that Gonella accomplishes, with color and his quick and determined brushstrokes, within that imaginary space created by memories, illusions, personal suggestions, but also sudden insights.
In the “Under the Skin of the Sea” series, there is a perception of diving (or baptism), a plunging immersion and whirlwinds that envelop the viewer. Water dominates in the canvases as a symbol of potential evolution, an element that brings “new life” and opens up new perspectives.

The man is the leading character in Gonella’s paintings, always concieved as a human being who may be in the position to choose how to deal with the present, with memories, emotions and, above all, choose what elements to “preserve”, or which to abandon within a personal path created by experience and dreams.
Under this perspective, Gonella's paintings are offered to the public as an opportunity, as an invitation to identify with each piece according to every individual's personal and unique characteristics.

Gluck50 is pleased to present Spectacle, an exhibition of work by American artist Jamie Isenstein created both in residence at Gluck50 and at her studio in Brooklyn, New York.

The word spectacle has two meanings in English that fall on opposite sides of the subject/object relationship. In one sense the word refers to a showy performance and in the other sense it is another word for eyeglasses. The first meaning demands to be watched, while the second meaning does the watching. For her exhibition at Gluck50, Isenstein plays on this double meaning to confuse subjects and objects by turning bodies into objects and objects into bodies. In doing this, Isenstein hopes to flip the power dynamic inherent in the subject/object relationship as a way to imagine giving agency and autonomy to the less powerful.

While in residence at Gluck50 Isenstein traveled through Northern Italy to investigate body parts displayed in church reliquaries and anatomy exhibits as well as the tourists who came to look at them. Isenstein began with the question of whether these bodies on display are people or objects. By being displayed in parts and because of the presence of the spectators with their objectifying gaze, Isenstein has concluded these bodies are no longer people, they have indeed turned into objects. In a performative gesture, Isenstein then proceeded to photograph the tourists looking at these bodies, to turn the spectators into an image as a way to objectify them in return. Yet at the entrance to Gluck50, the first thing a visitor will see are the photo release forms signed by these tourists, emphasizing their ability to make decisions about how their images are used, unlike the bodies on display.

Gluck50 has been divided into two mirroring galleries with live and recorded performances of bodies becoming objects as well as objects becoming audiences. In one gallery a video depicts a pair of legs with four feet dancing to a tango as if the legs were powered by themselves. The video is actually performer Elena Vazintaris dancing in a carnival mirror, erasing her body as she moves so that the legs and arms become self-propelled objects. Facing this projection is a series of sculptures of eyeglasses made from magnifying glasses, telescopes and microscopes. By using different types of lenses these eyeglasses see from different perspectives, giving each glasses their own subjectivity.

In the second gallery a car wheel with legs wearing roller skates lies on a pedestal on the verge of rolling away. As the work is a wheel wearing wheels, it is a symbol of autonomy; both a subject and an object with the ability to move itself. The legs on the wheel are live human legs so that the work alternates between being a performance and a sculpture as well. Like the bodies on display in churches and anatomy museums, this performance-sculpture with its disembodied legs appears to present the body as an object. Unlike the dead bodies on display though, this body remains perpetually alive as actors continuously replace each other in between moments of intermission. Projected on the wall across from the wheel performance/sculpture is a video of a single hand clapping. Typical clapping requires two hands, so this hand clapping by itself is performing a feat. In this way, it too becomes another symbol of autonomy, as both an audience and a spectacle itself.

Two photographs from Isenstein’s investigations into dead bodies on display are hung in the galleries as well. One photograph is of a fragment of a real skull’s eye socket placed next to a wax version of the eye as if it was alive. The other photograph is of a group of tourists at the Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua, observing Saint Anthony’s tongue displayed in a golden reliquary. The first image depicts the body as objects, yet the objects are also looking back at the viewer. The second image depicts the spectators themselves, though what they are looking for when they look at Saint Anthony’s tongue is another question, not coincidentally because Saint Anthony is the saint of lost things.

Jamie Isenstein was born in Portland, Oregon USA, but currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA. Her work has been shown recently at the MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Germany, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York City, NY and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta GA, USA. Her work has also been shown at MoMA/PS1, New York, NY, the Tate Liverpool, UK, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Manchester International Festival, UK. Next year she will present a project in the Great Hall at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU in New York City.

Gluck50 is an exhibition space and artist residence based in Milan, Italy where international as well as Italian artists are invited to create and exhibit new projects. A forthcoming catalogue documenting Jamie Isenstein’s residency and exhibition at Gluck50 will be published in 2018. For more information, please contact Chiara Callini at info@gluck50.com

The Laura Bulian Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition Life from My Window, curated by Andrey Misiano, that studies the contemporary experience of artists who were born in the Caucasus during the Soviet period yet that are rapidly losing touch with their socialist past.
First and foremost, all the artists participating in the exhibition – Babi Badalov (Lerik, Azerbaidjan, 1959), Lusine Djanyan (Ganja, Azerbaijan, 1981), Aslan Gaisumov (Grozny, Russia, 1991), Musay Gaivoronskiy (Dagestan, Russia, 1987) , Taus Makhacheva (Moscow, Russia, 1983), Koka Ramishvili (Tblisi, Georgia, 1959) have in common a painful search for their place in the world in the conflictual conditions of the new world order. They depict people that have experienced the end of history in one way or another and are now living in a disjointed globalized world.
At the same time, they retain recollections of Soviet life and the first post-Soviet decades that are currently seen in an extremely contradictory historical perspective. On the one hand, the practice of analyzing, reconsidering and debunking the Soviet project is rapidly spreading in the academic and artistic communities. On the other, at the political level, the regimes that have arisen on post-Soviet territories are selectively speculating on recollections of positive aspects of socialist life in order to patch holes in their profane ideological programs. To sum up, although it is difficult to say in what form the Soviet past is returning today, it is clear that the great expectations of the period continue to exist in the future conditional tense.
The exhibition’s title stems from the well-known work of an artist participating in the project: Koka Ramishvili’s War from My Window. Ramishvili documented the events of the Georgian Civil War in 1991-1993 directly from his window. The difficult and contradictory feeling of “the impossibility of feeling at home” is one of the exhibition’s main themes. The collapse of the USSR led to a series of armed conflicts, including two Chechen Wars that are at the center of Aslan Gaisumov’s work. In turn, the art of Lusine Djanyan focuses on the consequences of the Nagorny Karabakh War that forced a great number of Armenian and Azerbaijani families to leave their native lands in a hurry.
However, the exhibition is not limited to problems stemming from armed conflict. The history and culture of one’s people and the search for eternal truth are at the center of the work of the Dagestani artists Taus Makhacheva and Musa Gaivoronskiy. In turn, Babi Badalov focuses on the problems of people that were forced to leave their homes on account of political circumstances. Such problems are intrinsically connected to the individual’s right to self-determination, which is particularly apparent in the current sociocultural situation in the Caucasus.
The struggle or complex thoughtful dialogue with one’s surroundings takes very diverse forms in the work of these artists. Nevertheless, the latter are united by the anthropocentric context that they study and bring to the fore in their art. In the final analysis, every work in this exhibition invites viewers to share the artist’s highly personal intuitions that stem from different social circumstances or facts of his or her biography. Thus the personal experience of project participants brings to the fore a set of artistic and general human problems that have still not been fully understood.

Loom Gallery is pleased to present “Under Pressure”, the first Paul Gees’ Italian exhibition.
Over the latest 40 years he selected only three materials to work with: stone, iron and wood. He combined them together to find balanced solutions. Through harmony and inventiveness, his hundreds of variants all bring to mind the Arte Povera, the minimal and land art movements. Sculptures and objects rest for long time in his studio, where you can perceive a severity that it’s soften with a pinch of humour and an extraordinary feeling of an escaped danger. From simple and inner interventions it is possible to see a rigorous organisation, where research tends to prevail. Finally nothing falls, everything stands. To every work corresponds its stone and every iron has its own wood. Stone-iron-wood, like a Chinese mora of art, with an unconceivable serie of combinations, that makes it an obsession from whom a universe happens. Paul Gees was born in 1949 in Aaist, Belgium. Lives and works in Schoonaarde, Belgium

MARS presents “Firmament”, a solo show by Debora Hirsch, curated by Fabio Carnaghi.

The exhibition is the third in a series of special projects entitled “My Room On Mars” that will present new points of view of MARS as anomalous white cube.

In her artistic practice, Debora Hirsch explores the ambiguity of contemporary communication system, heterogeneous language and post-digital culture.
In the site-specific project that she conceived for Mars, Debora Hirsch evokes nebulae and constellations, there where the space is absolute zero, the tabula rasa in which, like tiles of a mosaic, the suspended artworks migrate to unveil a world of hidden meanings that reality encloses. The subject of knowledge implies then an epistemic effort, a disclosure that the digitized surface hides and blurs.

Poor Poor Jerry
Over time, music, cinema and television built a sharable and common imaginary, intertwining on many levels, and forming a free sentimental encyclopedia not based on an alphabetic or gender order. A set of signs apt to determine ages, places and experiences, both on a collective and personal level. Even if for many this experience becomes an instrument to better arrange emotions and build personal maps with which to move inside reality through the association of memories, for someone else it represents a burden from which it’s impossible to get free, a dead weight hindering new thoughts and original visions. Poor Poor Jerry - thanks to a display scheme articulated through videos and sound installations - investigates our collective awareness, overlapping the deeds of an icon of American animated series and desert landscapes of Lanzarote with pop cinema soundtracks and dialogues.

Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea hosts for the second time the solo show of the young Finnish artist Jenni Hiltunen.
After Pretty Absence in 2013, this exhibition, titled Glass Walls, brings forward the reflection on the image and the appearing as a condition of existence and the idea of woman as a subject of privileged inquiry.
Hiltunen represents herself and all women at the same time, capturing a definite state of mind, the one in which she stops pretending, stops posing, an imperfect moment and for this dense meaning.
In fact a recurring theme in her artistic research is fashion photography and the “posing culture” created by social media and the network that show a perfect, sugar-coated existence which represent exactly the life we would like to live or rather the script that we are reciting.
The woman portrayed by Jenni Hiltuten goes beyond the standard concept of femininity and gender divisions, is a fluent woman who goes above and develops the pre-established role for her in the contemporary society.
Jenni Hiltunen’s paintings want to become an object of identification, to tell real feelings in everyday contexts.
That’s way she uses a dense and resolute painting, in contrast, saturated, brush strokes that leave the sign of matter on the canvas and show the dissonances that are in the world and, at the same time, the positive energy that these and the colors can sprinkle.
Hiltunen portrays models who are tired of posing, their image is exacerbated and their attitude is scornful but introvert. The act of painting has transformed the starting image, highlighting the most real and personal details, analyzing reality in all its facets, more or less pleasing, sometimes detecting defects but with a cathartic intent. These women seem to be waiting but in reality they are simply living the present and the glass wall is the painting that allows us to look beyond the wall in the real life.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog with critical text by Antonio D'Amico.

Monica De Cardenas is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by British painter Chantal Joffe.

Joffe is known for her portraits, painted in a fluid, smooth style, in which she is able to capture the emotions, weaknesses and vitality of human existence. Her subjects are often female: girls, adolescents and women seen in different moments of life.
The artist depicts them with a gaze that is halfway between the immediacy of a snapshot and a situation of emphatic distortion. These studies on the human condition express no judgments, but appear one after the other with great energy and engagement, also thanks to the bold rejection of any formal order. The psychological intensity of the figures makes our very opinion ambiguous, disturbing and gratifying us at the same time.

With influences ranging from Piero della Francesca to Edgar Degas and from Francis Bacon to Alex Katz, Joffe has based her work on a direct and intimate observational relationship between the painter and her sitter. Mostly her subjects are family members and personal friends, sometimes images from historical figures or the mass media. She is also engaged in a series of candid, often searing self-portraits and tender double portraits with her daughter Esme. Whatever their origin, her subjects have the intensity and psychological richness of characters, like instants captured from the lives of literary heroines.

Within this subject area, Joffe experiments widely with form, color, texture and approach. The paintings swing between the poles of forethought and improvisation, as flurries of brushstrokes repeatedly clash and fuse across the canvas’s arena of action. Although drawing is important to her, she never delineates her forms, but rather allows color and shape to merge as a cumulation of her imaginative process. As she told The Independent in 2014: “I paint to think”.

A group of new pastels is collectively titled ‘Family Pictures’. Joffe has described the mesmeric and physical, arm-straining experience of their making, the thickly applied chalk accumulating with a dusty, luminous purity. There is a sense of democratic, mobile immediacy about these sticks of pigment, the looser strokes they occasion turning clothes, or the stripes of a beach hut, towards abstraction even as they retain the sense of gesture and place of their making. Here again, experience and artistic form, emotional connection and representation, are suspended in lively, irresolvable association on Joffe’s picture plane, which accommodates all manner of psychological and spatio-temporal complexities.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Royal Academy Woollaston Prize in 2006. Joffe has exhibited internationally at the National Museum of Iceland, Reykjavík (2016); National Portrait Gallery, London (2015); Jewish Museum, New York (2015, solo); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2015, solo); Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2014-2015); Saatchi Gallery, London (2013 -2014); Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011); Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2009); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2005); Galleri KB, Oslo (2005) and Bloomberg Space, London (2004).

Dzenan Hadžihasanović
Blank Title
Text by Ilari Valbonesi
Prometeogallery di Ida Pisani Via G. Ventura, 6 – Milano
Opening: September 19, 2017 at 7pm 20.09 – 4.11.2017
Prometeogallery wishes to present BLANK TITLE, the first solo exhibition by Dzenan Hadžihasanovic.
The Spanish indignados, the Arab springs, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, thousands of people marching on the streets of European countries, the Balkans, Turkey, and the recent protest in Barcelona to call for Catalan independence. These protests, happening along the streets and in the squares of cities all around the world, provide a compelling visual evidence of a “Deliberative democracy”.
However, there does not seem to exist a social movement directly demanding a democracy that is not inscribed in a Capital that avails both of visuality and the instruments of its control, which must confront itself with an internal state of traditional censorship, violence, and power games.
The paintings of Dzenan Hadžihasanovi (Sarajevo, 1987) constitute the most rational and conscious attempt to bring to light such forms of collective protest. The factors that characterise a rupture with pictorial practices from the last century, the same century that marks the connection and disconnection of the practice of revolution, are the decomposition of colours, the repetitive perspective of the gesture, the photographic angle, and the ‘unruly’ form. These all come together, clustered under a new political neo-impressionism, and act in a speculative manner, a sort of experimental optics of the mind, unfolding anew with each canvas.
Discourses, slogans, writings on posters become whitened, and turn into cores of an abstract – and formal – resistance. The multitude moving on the surface of Hadžihasanovi ’s canvases differs from concepts of ‘mass’, or ‘population’. As such, it distrusts representation, even when this is conceived in post- or neo-modern terms. In its concrete reality, traces of individualism abound, in the shape of entities marching towards the profound plenitude of life, which cast a gaze on themselves, and reveal their physicality through an interplay of splashes of colour, chromatic superimpositions and drippings.
The canvases of BLANK TITLE become testimony to a militant painterly practice that reaffirms the revolutionary value of the artistic creation produced by the individual, and reveals a real difference of art, as being made of both history and contradictions.

Giovanni Morbin Privazione (Deprivation)

Sep 19 - Nov 4, 2017

Prometeogallery is pleased to present Privazione (Deprivation), Giovanni Morbin’s first solo show at the gallery

The performance of “Peroratore” (Preacher, or The art of swaying) will be held during the opening, with the participation Pietro Quattriglia Venneri.

Prometeogallery is pleased to present Privazione (Deprivation), Giovanni Morbin’s first solo show at the gallery. The exhibition concentrates on the theoretical and material implications of withdrawal - that is, of self-discipline through the negative, and at the same time through allegiance and entailment with one’s body. Such semantic complexity as found in Morbin’s work suggests a similarly intricate political criticism.

The exhibition is designed in three thematic sections, organised on two levels. The space gives the opportunity to gather several long-term projects that the artist has started and completed, paused and then resumed, in the last ten years.

Language and its forms, executive protocols, a-focal sculptures are taken to symbolise the spatiotemporal dimension, to signify both movement and stillness. By blending all these together, Morbin synthesises an artistic practice with no real existence, one that has lingered for over thirty years along the boundaries of art’s mimesis, transformed into the sharpest critique of the institution; a practice that speaks through irony and realistic bitterness.

Conceived as a proactive organism, the exhibit opens with Atrophy (2017), a trophy to anarchy that abandons its celebrative functions, and mutates into a triumphal epitaph. Atrophy is a sculpture “destined” to its pedestal, with which it fuses entirely. Through a protocol of collective purchase and pre-emption of the whole artwork, the weight of the sculpture and its plinth wastes away, and reduces its value to simple tissues. Thus, Atrophy wishes to experiment with the impossibility of transforming an object into a commercial item.

A similar line of thought is displayed by the series of sealed and framed letters belonging to the series Personale, strettamente personale (Personal, strictly personal, 2014). Each letter contains a secret from the artist’s erotic self. The purchase of a letter pushes the buyer to abstain and censor their curiosity, and presents this decision as the sole to maintain the value of the artwork intact.

The fetishism of such apologetic objects is contained by the trophy, and by the secret treasured therein. In so doing, Morbin reverts the significance of ownership, and downplays its meaning to a mere relic of possession. No one will ever fully own these oeuvres, some will only be the illegitimate and partial holders.

Peroratore (Preacher, or The art of swaying - 2017), appears dually as a secondary structure, and a support for action in the second expositive block. It emerges as an analytic replica of some of the simplest populist discourses. This minimalist platform is reinforced by a thorough archive of gestures, postures, and demagogic rhetoric, and strengthened by a bibliography of manuals on strategies of persuasion, seduction, and prayer, it becomes the potential arena for the artist's parodical self-branding.
The gallery’s basement hosts the multi-piece work Tergicristallino (The windscreen wiper - 2016). Constituted of several automated bollards that occupy the physical space of the gallery, the machines frantically clean the room. Such order elevates the space to a meditative dimension distinguished by the sterile practice of measuring the void.
Privazione (Deprivation) unravels through the presentation of temporal concretions, behavioural readymades, and failed attempts to build monuments. Each piece, like an ex voto, is the fusion of an ethical commitment, and its material result.